Estately, which supposedly has “the most accurate index of homes for sale, straight from the MLS,” kindly put together this super-handy chart which allows us to see what our state “has more of per capita than any other.”

I’m impressed with the results! Apparently Texas has the most pet tigers, Oregon likes to sell cigarettes to children, and poor ol’ Delaware has the most registered sex offenders.

Take this map with a grain of salt though, the data comes from “hundreds of surveys and studies,” so you know it’s legit, right?

Anyway, I had a good laugh at this one. Especially with Pennsylvanians obsession with “holiday music downloads.” What’s the deal, Pennsylvania? You can’t get enough of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”?

This was one of the most impudent stunts in the history of art-noise provocations: in 1986, a Houston, TX band of shit-stirrers called Culturcide released their second LP, Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America. The album consisted of parodic covers of then-recent radio hits by the likes of Springsteen, Huey Lewis and the News, USA For Africa, Pat Benatar, yadda yadda yadda. Some were hilarious, some brutally satirical, a few frankly just kinda dumb. But unlike “Weird Al” Yankovic, Culturcide didn’t re-record the music. Their vocalist Perry Webb simply warbled his own lyrical agitations atop the original recordings. No permission for that usage was obtained, as it was never even actually sought.

The album never saw and surely never WILL see another issue after that initial self-release. The threat of lawsuits pre-empted any further editions, so once the recording became notorious, it also became impossible to get, which only magnified its legend. According to a 1998 article in the Houston Press:

A blatantly illegal work of manic-dub genius, the album (now unavailable) ransacked 14 of the 1980s’ most vapid radio hits—everything from “We Are the World” to “Ebony and Ivory.” In keeping with its lo-fi, anti-technology stance, Culturcide simply rerecorded the tracks, changing the titles (for example, “We Aren’t the World”) and superimposing nasty, disparaging vocals, jarring cut-and-paste clatter and dizzying loop effects over the original versions—all, of course, without authorization.

Despite the band’s haphazard distribution methods, Tacky Souvenirs managed to find its way to a number of critics, several of whom commended the band for brazenly going where no other indie outfit had gone before. (Some of those same writers commented on the album’s one-off feel—funny, considering the album took the band five years to complete.)

Though Tacky Souvenirs wasn’t always easy for the layman to track down, it did earn Culturcide a kind of cult celebrity. But the costs far outweighed the benefits: Representatives for three artists whose work was desecrated on Tacky Souvenirs threatened legal action, and subsequent settlements emptied the band’s already piddling coffers. The ensuing lull in Culturcide’s spirits, combined with various creative conflicts and substance abuse issues, eventually led to the group’s calling it quits in 1990. Naturally, Tacky Souvenirs is now a collector’s item.

Of course, 1998 was before discogs.com existed, and the album is nowadays findable with a mouse-click, though it ain’t necessarily gonna be cheap. And as you’ll soon see, it’s not really for everyone, anyway. Be mindful, ahead lie naughty words and extreme jadedness:

If you live in the Georgia district represented by Republican Rep. Tom Kirby, rest assured that your government, via Mr. Kirby’s zany style of “leadership,” is “getting out in front of” the growing problem of genetically engineered glowing human beings. That’s right, Rep. Kirby introduced a bill in the state legislature, er… preemptively banning the mixing of human and for instance, jellyfish embryos. Forget about roads, schools, good jobs, that kind of shit, this is a real problem… or is it? Even Mr. Kirby himself isn’t so sure…

“I’ve had people tell me it is but I have not verified that for sure,” state Rep. Tom Kirby (R) told WSB-TV. “It’s time we either get in front of it or we’re going to be chasing our tails.”

Look at him. Look at that dumb Republican face on him. He looks like he DOES have a tail.

You could file this away with all the dipsy-doodles who want to stamp out sharia law in South Carolina, but that would be missing out on the special stupid that Mr. Kirby brings to the (grand, old) party. This is even a lower IQ fear than something like the Agenda 21 “thing.”

We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue. Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo. We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants. The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia. This bill is about protecting Human life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life.

Researchers have been able to splice jellyfish embryos with genetic material from rabbits, mice, cats, pigs and rhesus monkeys for well over a decade, this isn’t new, but the belief that science is trying—currently—to build “a glow-in-the-dark human” as Kirby puts it, is.

Like where did this idiot hear about this “problem,” huh? AN ALL CAPS EMAIL FORWARDED BY HIS GRANDPA? Radio frequencies only he can hear? An Alex Jones-wannabe’s podcast, perhaps? An old coot in a bar outside of Atlanta? He practically comes right out and admits in the clip below that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Roads, schools, good jobs… or this cartoon idiocy?

Buffoons like Tom Kirby get elected because… people vote for them and for no other reason.

Jon Stewart has called Florida “America’s Wang,” and it does seem like the state’s strong peninsular properties somehow attract people who are on the end of their rope. In Florida Man, Sean Dunne’s endlessly quotable and surprisingly poignant documentary about worn-out and inebriated layabouts in the Sunshine State, the viewer meets a wide variety of beercan philosophers in the course of 50 minutes, many of whom have tales to tell, of the government’s economic dependence on the incarcerated, of the heady thrills of a lifetime of brawling, of the murderous tendencies of pill addicts, of the undeniable pleasures of an impromptu three-way underneath a pier on a beach.

I’m tempted to call this movie “the real Fight Club,” but that’s not right. It’s “Old Drunk Guy Parking Lot”—a majority of the footage was obtained outside various bars, motels, laundromats, and tattoo parlors, and certainly a majority of the interviewees, if not nearly all of them, have booze sloshing around their system. However, it’s hard to state anything equivocal beyond the two facts laid down in the title—it’s in Florida, and it’s about males. Not all of them are old, and not all of them are drunk. Taken together, however, there’s an unmistakable commonality among the worn-out old dudes who were willing to interact with Dunne and his crew. As one guy says, “When I moved here I was a damn Yankee. I got upgraded to redneck.” (Come to think of it, “Upgraded to Redneck” isn’t a bad alternate title for the movie.)

To his credit, Dunne had not much in the way of an agenda when he started the movie, letting serendipity dictate the content. As he says,

Basically we just drove around aimlessly, stopping any time we saw something or someone that interested us and one thing would lead to another and the universe would pull us in one direction or another. Most of what you’re seeing in the final film is the entirety of our interaction with these guys. It was quick and to the point and I didn’t even interview people besides the occasional “Any words of wisdom?” So what we got was a whole bunch of people telling stories and talking about whatever was on their mind. It was a strange and exciting journey that took us to a lot of places we didn’t expect.

This succession of cocksure, mostly unemployed or “retired” drifters or near-drifters may be the most resonant depiction of Florida since Errol Morris’s Vernon, Florida, with which it shares more than a little in terms of directorial strategy. I’m tempted to lard up this post with the hard-won wisdom the movie’s subjects spout. The fellow whose footage opens the movie is a dessicated George Carlin-looking cat with a handlebar mustache who just lives to tussle. “I love to make people bleed, I swear to God I do,” he says. “Once you get to Florida, you don’t ever want to go back north,” is the questionable premise of a superannuated barfly wearing a U.S. Navy trucker hat.

Moments after declaring, “I’m not a drunk,” an elderly African-American fellow jokes that “Ace Liquor Store over there” is “my second home.” In the next sequence the owner of the same store says, memorably, “Here in the liquor store, we see probably 50% of the people arrive by either foot or by bicycle, because they all have DUIs,” adding that most of his problem drinkers “eventually pass away. If you have a drinking problem, handle it.”

There’s much more, but it’s better experienced firsthand. If you have a hour to kill, you could do a lot worse than spending it with this hardy bunch of dipsomanaical survivors. Watch it below:

As passionate fans of the Friday Night Lights TV series will tell you, you don’t need to care that much about football itself to care deeply about the carefully drawn characters of that much-loved small town drama. Something similar can almost be said of the Esquire Network’s returning youth sports docu-series Friday Night Tykes, but there’s a frankly shocking level of car crash brutality—that’s all being egged on by the “adults” in charge—that completely subverts what you think this show is going to be all about.

Friday Night Tykes focuses on the teams of the Texas Youth Football Association, the most popular, competitive and well-supported league of its kind in the United States. TYFA also has a reputation for controversy, and for the violent intensity of its pre-teen players, some who are as young as eight or nine. There is no size limit for these kids, either. The bigger the better. And did I mention the crazy parents? TYFA’s got its share of lunatics in the bleachers.

As season two starts, we get a recap of some of the most eyebrow-raising moments from last year. Answering the big question in many viewers’ minds (“WHAT IN THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING?!?!?!”) some of the coaches from the first series are gone, one for flagrantly encouraging viciously unsportsmanlike behavior (all of which this psycho was, for some reason, completely unashamed to allow the Esquire Network’s cameras to capture). There is a “welcome to the Terrordome” element to the TYFA—these little kids are encouraged to act like MMA gladiators. Tackle ‘em sure, but make sure to hurt ‘em real bad when ya do it. In TYFA, the all-American sport is sport is often enacted with the sort of violence associated with backyard wrestling. They just need to outfit their eight-year-old fullbacks with 2x4s and nunchucks and stop beating around the bush.

To be honest, I was left mouth-agape by this show within the opening moments. The thing that will probably occur to you as you watch it, as it did to me, is that these people are willing to subject their own children to something that is not really a great distance from cagefighting, but cagefighting done with little kids who are crying and puking! It’s so twisted! Some of the parents are so harsh, aggressive and downright nasty towards their children in public that you don’t have to use your imagination much to wonder how they might behave in the privacy of their own homes.

A narrator asks “But how hard is too hard? [Pediatricians warn against any sort of full body tackle until a child is at least 14 years of age] How far is too far? [Just wait!] Is youth sports truly about the kids, or is it truly about the parents?”

That last question is left shrewdly unanswered by the filmmakers.

Watch the entire first episode of the Esquire Network’s second season of Friday Night Tykes here.

Last week we told you about Pet Photo Fun, the surely well-meaning but perhaps a tad strange people who’ll animate a photo of your dead pet singing you a song of consolation from the beyond. I thought that was an ultimate in funerary tackiness, but Cremation Solutions has that shit beat by a country mile. They will craft a cremation urn to resemble the head of your deceased loved one. And for reasons never clarified, their online sample urn is the head of US President Barack Obama.

Personal cremation urns can be designed to look like anyone. We just need good pictures. We prefer one picture from the front and one from the side. Complexions can be adjusted in the final stages and customers get a chance to proof the results. We will produce a computer generated image of what your urn will look like. Once you have approved the image, we will begin production. Like all of our custom made products, their are no refunds and we can not make changes to these urns.

The urns are available in two sizes: the “keepsake” size is essentially a shrunken head which, for $600, will hold only a portion of an adult human’s ashes, or you can opt for a full-sized replica of the decedent’s head for $2,600. Which I guess seems a fair price for a cremains-stuffed uncanny abomination of your dead loved one’s severed fucking head on a plaque? (If the decedent was more the active type, there’s a poseable figure option.)

The personal urn does not come with hair. For hair we can digitally add hair if you wish, as you can see with our sample of president Obama. For people with longer hair we can add a wig from your specifications. This cremation urn comes on an elegant solid marble base. A Plaque and nameplate are also available.

A blithering idiot, far too stupid to realize just how deeply dumb she truly is decided to tell science where to get off. Megan Fox—not to be confused with the gorgeous Hollywood actress—has uploaded a video of her visit to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to YouTube for all the world to see point and laugh at.

In November 2014, Megan Fox toured the Field Museum’s “Evolving Earth” exhibit to audit it for bias. She found many examples of inconsistencies and the Field Museum’s insistence that people support opinion as fact without proof. The Field Museum pushes certain theories as if they are absolute proven law when that is not how the scientific method works. She found enough bias to show that the people who put this exhibit together at the Field Museum pushed an agenda with quasi-religious overtones: the cult of “science” where the “scientists” are more like high priests pushing a religion instead of using the correct scientific method. Aside from having time machines, there is no way these people can be this certain about things they speculate happened millions of years ago before recorded history.

More of the “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and ‘You weren’t there, you didn’t see it.” arguments.

“You weren’t there, you didn’t see it.” I have never been able to grasp how individuals who use this argument are incapable of seeing the irony of their own statements.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, is this bitch still an idiot?

Yes. There is no circumstance in which she isn’t an idiot. This incident has permanently collapsed her wavefunction.

There are an infinite number of universes. She is a complete idiot in all of them.

UPDATE: More from reddit. You know she’s reading them, but will they have any effect on a plank like Megan?

Exactly my thought. I barely watched any of it, but I saw her saying something along the lines “..don’t tell me what you think on how animals started from a cell, you don’t know so don’t tell me you do, or my kids….” Yet I’m sure her religion has a creation story that they can prove either…. It’s just so weird to see someone reaching like that for an argument, and them thinking it’s solid.

“I don’t know what this word is” she says. Then maybe don’t act like you are an expert on the topic?

I love that she begins her attempt to disprove evolution with an admission that she has no idea how to even pronounce the word.

One of the simplest principles of biology….That’s how I knew she had no education.

I’ve thought about how to respond to people that have the “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” argument. It’s surprising hard to counter, mostly because the people with that frame of mind are stubbornly stupid.

I think the best way to elucidate the issue for them is to ask - if the original colonies in America came from Europeans - why are there still Europeans?

That’s a pretty good analogy. The best I could come up with is, say you make some dough. You throw half of it in the oven and it becomes bread. So if bread comes from dough, why is there still dough?

Might as well disable comments so no one can actually explain to me why I’m wrong! LALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU!

This is the kind of thing the rest of the world sees and thinks that this is what Americans are like… BECAUSE WE ARE.

Fox probably votes in every election, too. DO check out her videos about the “problem” in her local library. It’s a real saga. Fox also reviews YA books looking for “subversive” messages and she is a featured contributor on goofball / rightwing / old people’s blog PJMedia. She is working on a book which she claims “will be an exhaustive investigation into the myriad of ways that our children are corrupted by the Left’s anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda.”

Trust me, have a look at what she’s got there on her Facebook page. It tells a very “interesting” story. Not necessarily the one ol’ Megan thinks it tells, but a very “interesting” story nonetheless. Bless.

Over the Halloween weekend I was visiting my family in Wheeling, WV (it was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary) and I needed to buy a cheap one-hitter to help get me through it. There’s only one place to buy that sort of thing in my hometown and this would be Wheeling’s sole smut emporium, the very downmarket Market Street News.

Thirty-five years ago, in better economic times for that town, Market Street News was still a dirty book store, but back then it also sold bongs, rolling papers, fake drugs like “Lettuce Opium” or “Coke Snuff,” British rock mags, National Lampoon, biker rags like Easy Rider and Iron Horse, High Times and a small handful of underground comics. A bead curtain separated the front of the shop from the over 21 area and the place smelled heavily of incense, cigarettes and Pine-Sol. It was here, age 11, where I bought my first issue of High Times, the October 1977 issue with Johnny Rotten on the cover and the now infamous “Ted Nugent shits his pants to get out of the draft” interview. What kind of degenerate sold a little kid High Times?

Let me assure you that I was not an innocent child. By that age, I’d already read Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!, I owned a copy of Naked Lunch and had already tried getting high (unsuccessfully) by eating fresh ground nutmeg and morning glory seeds, something I’d read about in that book’s infamous index section. I wanted to do drugs, I just didn’t know where to get ‘em (aside from “Lettuce Opium,” which yes, I admit that I tried.“Coke Snuff,” too!)

I couldn’t “score” real drugs, but at the age of 11, in a low level smut shop in a podunk West Virginia town, I was able to get my mitts on something equally mind-expanding (and only slightly less illicit): Zap Comix. Lewd, crude, incendiary, mind-blowing in the extreme and incredibly smart, I embraced Zap Comix wholeheartedly, even if I, a sixth grader, was considerably younger than the audience of “adult intellectuals” it was ostensibly intended for.

Although Zap founder Robert Crumb himself was already a very well-known and widely respected artist and counterculture hero by the time I discovered Zap in 1977, I can’t image that it was too much earlier than 1973 or ‘74 that something like Zap Comix would have had the kind of distribution that would have allowed it filter down to small town America. The first (#0) issue of Zap came out in 1968. Not every small town had a head shop at that time, of course, and even when they did, carrying Zap Comix—which presented some completely insane stuff, images WAY more perverse than anything that was being cooked up in Denmark or Sweden at the time—was probably not worth the heat it would bring, especially in that line of work. If they can bust you for selling bongs, why carry filthy and obscene comic books to further tempt fate?

Most people probably found out about Zap generally around the same time I did, no matter what age they were. Unless you were living in a big city or in a college town, it would have been highly unlikely to have encountered it otherwise. This is why I associate Zap with the punk era. At least that’s when a copy first made it into my young hands.

Crumb did the first two issues on his own before ultimately assembling a “Magnificent Seven” of the best underground artists around—San Francisco poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, Marxist biker cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton (the creator of “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”), painter Robert Williams, the demented S. Clay Wilson and later, after Griffin’s death, Paul Mavrides, known for his Church of the Subgenius graphics. The Zapatistas were a sort of “supergroup”—the dharma warriors of comics. Inkslingers. Revolutionaries. The best of the best. Their only yardsticks for comparison were each other and that sort of fraternal competition raised the bar and kept their art constantly evolving and their social satire razor sharp.

Like punk (and Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, Firesign Theatre and John Waters) Zap Comix kind of helped to deprogram me at a young age during my rustbelt Christian upbringing. My deeply religious parents never looked twice at my “funnie books” but if they had they’d have been utterly appalled, finding between the covers of Zap Comix characters like S. Clay Wilson’s gay pirate “Captain Pissgums” who liked to have his crew of perverts, um, piss in his mouth or the “Checkered Demon,” a randy devil cheerfully doing the most obscene things that I’d ever seen depicted on the printed page. It was shocking then and it’s equally shocking today.

See what I mean? Remind yourself that this strip is now nearly half a century old. The reason I linked to it is because embedding it would probably have made our advertisers very nervous about what kind of people we are! Crumb’s Zap contributions were never as out and out repulsive as Wilson’s, yet he was still utterly fearless in portraying his own infantile sexual fantasies and neuroses (and finding willing groupies to help him act them out along the way. Which he then wrote about in subsequent issues of Zap. Heavy meta…).

The goalposts have moved quite a bit over the decades as “obscenity” has been redefined by culture, AND YET that vile, hilariously fucked up strip has lost virtually none of its power to offend. This is only one of the reasons to love S. Clay Wilson—whose work ultimately sets the tone of Zap because his is the wildest, most feral and least compromising—his willingness to basically puke on his reader’s sensibilities, no matter how “far out” they think they are. The sole purpose is to be brutally offensive, no more no less. You can look for something deeper, go ahead, but I’m not sure you’re going to find it in a piece like “Come Fix” (click for pdf) in which a lesbian biker chick injects semen intravenously with an interesting result.

The front and back cover of Zap #14 by S. Clay Wilson

In the context of the late 1960s that was something both sickening and ENLIGHTENING. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with flower power or hippie. Zap Comix was cynical and dark, twisted and perverted, full of “gags, jokes, kozmic trooths.” Zap wasn’t interested in persuading you of anything, it wanted to beat its epiphanies into you.

This is another reason I see Zap Comix as being aligned with punk, because philosophically-speaking it was. Indeed in its crudeness, lewdness and desire to shake its readers out of their complacency, Zap anticipates punk (and a lot of other things!) and surely would have influenced many of punk’s prime movers who undoubtedly were exposed to it.

Anyway, when I bought my one-hitter, I got into a conversation with the guy behind the counter and I mentioned that I used to buy Zap Comix there when I was a kid. Then the very next morning in the hotel I read an article in the New York Times about how Fantagraphics were publishing the complete run of Zap, along with a sixteenth and final issue, in a deluxe slipcase box set weighing over 20 lbs, complete with sixteen high quality giclée prints of each Zap Comix cover.

The front and back cover of Zap #13 by Victor Moscoso

I immediately wrote to Fantagraphics fab director of publicity Jacq Cohen and requested a review copy of The Complete Zap Comix. It was sent Fedex two-day shipping, which seemed to me to be the longest two days of my entire fucking life. An eternity. In fact, it ended up being a day late, and by that time, I was truly salivating over the prospect of its arrival. I was not disappointed. I’m a man with a lot of toys and The Complete Zap Comix went immediately into my “prized possessions” category. If you’re reading this thinking “Yep, I need that” trust me, you do need it. However, as far as pricey Christmas presents to yourself go, you might not want to wait for Santa to lay this one under your tree because it’s probably going to sell out. Only 2500 have been printed and from what I can tell anecdotally from how many friends of mine are buying it, it won’t last long.

The irony of turning something that was once sold in dirty bookstores into a $500 collectible is delicious, but I can’t think of a more deserving title than Zap. The production quality of The Complete Zap Comix is first rate and the pages are clearer than they’ve ever been, blown up to 9.75” x 13.25” and painstakingly cleaned up digitally. Everything comes in a sturdy, gold-embossed slipcase and there’s a separate book dedicated to “The Zap Story,” an oral history/scrapbook that also reprints some Zap rarities and “jams” where each of the artists would complete a frame or two—upping the ante in the process—and then pass it on to the next guy.

In the title here, I declare that The Complete Zap Comix box set “is the greatest thing in the history of the world, ever” and I’m only semi-exaggerating. Seeing the whole of the Zap run laid out like this, it seems obvious—so very, very obvious—what a profound and truly American cultural treasure this is. This is great art of historical and cultural importance that changed people, blew their minds and inspired them. I know that it changed ME. Zap Comix deserves to be reappraised and valued for what it’s truly worth and Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with this stunning box set.

Now the Smithsonian Institute needs to step up to the plate while the remaining Zap artists are still alive and kicking against the pricks and give them their due. It could happen. It should happen. Let’s hope it does happen.

Below, one of the greatest—and most eerily prophetic—comics EVER by Gilbert Shelton, “Wonder Wart-Hog’s Believe It or LEAVE It!”...Um… he could be talking about TODAY’s America, here, couldn’t he???

I don’t know who the target market for a velvet painting of Pat Buchanan is supposed to be. Extremist right wingers aren’t known for their adeptness at parsing irony, and it seems doubtful that patrician right wingers would darken their homes with an objet with cultural connotations so déclassé. And I can’t see why even the most thrift-store hardened ironist would want such a thing around—I’ve harbored plenty of ironic art in my day, and while if I actually saw a velvet Pat Buchanan hanging somewhere I would surely say “WHOA, AWESOME,” not in a million lifetimes would I want that pasty, jowly, vulgar, hateful, fascist walrus staring down at me from the walls of my own home day in and day out.

And yet, the velvet Buchanan is a real thing that really exists and someone who is so inclined could, in principle, actually own it. In fact, Pat is one of many right wing icons whose velvety vileness is enshrined and sold at velvetpaintings.com (“Quality you can FEEL”), though the list of honorees on the site skids to a halt during the George W Bush administration.

I LOOOOOOVE how Newt Gingrich comes off looking like a sentient, murderous ventriloquist dummy in a cheap movie.